Method and system for the automatic loading of air transport units

Abstract

A method and a system for the automatic loading of air-transport units. In the method, the piece goods and the air-transport unit, on at least one side of which is an openable loading opening, are transported to the packing location, when the piece goods are packed automatically through the loading opening into the air-transport unit. The air-transport unit is tilted in connection with the packing, in such a way that the side with the loading opening is raised relative to the side opposite to the loading opening, so that the air-transport unit is loaded in at least two different attitudes.

Description

TECHNICAL FIELD[0001]The present invention relates to piece-goods automation. In particular, the invention relates to the automatic packing of containers and baggage carts used in air transport. More specifically, the invention relates to a loading method and system according to Claims 1 and 10.BACKGROUND ART[0002]It is important for airline business to maximize the time that aircraft are in the air and correspondingly minimize the time that aircraft stand at airports. Besides unavoidable servicing, a great deal of flight capacity is lost in the so-called turnaround of the aircraft, in which the aircraft is unloaded and loaded between landing and take-off. It has been observed that one bottleneck in the turnaround of an aircraft particularly concerns the handling of piece goods, such as bags and packets, to be loaded into the hold. The increase in air traffic has made the elimination of this bottleneck more urgent than ever. This is because the airlines' international reservation sy...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0015]In the loading method according to the invention, the principle of the average degree of filling is used and the air-transport units are loaded using devices with economical manufacturing and installation costs, smart sensors and computation algorithms supporting and controlling their operation, as well as efficient packing methods, in such a way that the air-transport units are loaded computationally sufficiently full. This is because, in the method, the filling of the transport units is facilitated by tilting them relative to the necessary degrees of freedom that are useful in terms of increasing the efficiency of the packing event, in such a way that the baggage is packed clearly faster, more directly, and to a higher degree of filling than if the transport unit is stationary and in a vertical position during the packing event, as in the known solutions.

[0017]According to one embodiment, the air-transport unit is manipulated in several degrees of freedom and backwards and forwards relative to at least one degree of freedom, in order to compact the pieces inside the air-transport unit and to increase the stability of the totality (stack) they form.

[0021]Significant advantages are achieved with the aid of the invention. By automating the loading stage, in a manner that is advantageous in terms of packing and the packing result, but economical in terms of the manufacturing, installation, and operating costs for the solution used for this, it will be possible to replace manual handling of baggage, which is slow and expensive and endangers work safety and work health. This will reduce airport personnel costs significantly. In fact, the use of one of the possible automation solutions according to the invention can replace the work input of five people, signifying a direct improvement in profitability. On the other hand, automation reduces the possibility of work-related injuries and improves airport reliability. Above all, automation increases capacity and accelerates the loading process, to the benefit of both customers and airlines.

[0023]Because, with the aid of the method, the air-transport units can be loaded to an even degree of filling, the aircraft will also be loaded evenly, in which case the even weight distribution will have a favourable effect of the aircraft's fuel economy. This is because by weighing each bag handled, the precise weight and even the weight distribution of each air-transport unit will also be known. The use of precise weights when calculating an aircraft's weight distribution has a favourable effect of the aircraft's fuel economy, especially on long flights.

[0024]In addition, in connection with automatic packing, it is easy to implement imaging of the location of each bag in the container, so that if necessary the removal of a specific bag from an already loaded aircraft—or from a container or baggage cart awaiting loading—will be accelerated and facilitated, because its appearance and location based on digital imaging can be transmitted to the personnel responsible for loading the aircraft, for example as an MMS message to a cell phone, or using some other known methods to some terminal device suitable for the purpose and present in the system.

Problems solved by technology

Besides unavoidable servicing, a great deal of flight capacity is lost in the so-called turnaround of the aircraft, in which the aircraft is unloaded and loaded between landing and take-off.

It has been observed that one bottleneck in the turnaround of an aircraft particularly concerns the handling of piece goods, such as bags and packets, to be loaded into the hold.

On the other hand, a short stopover time puts considerable pressure on the baggage handling system.

The drop in the level of service relating to baggage handling, experienced by passengers especially in recent years, is a nearly direct result of increased air traffic, of the increased handling and security check time required by the baggage moving in it, which additional investments in conveyor and automation technology made in airport infrastructure have been unable to correspondingly shorten, and the increase in the costs relating to a labour-intensive operating culture.

As is known, the loading of piece goods to be transported by air has been quite labour intensive.

However, a single robot cell at Amsterdam Schiphol airport is the only known system in practical operation.

Despite an extensive and known customer need, corresponding robot cells have not, however, spread for use in other airports.

Significant drawbacks are associated with the prior art.

It is obvious that the manual packing of bags and other piece goods is disadvantageous.

First of all, a loader's work is extremely stressful, as the manual transfer of bags weighing as much as 40 kg in three shifts is wearing on the employees both physically and mentally.

For example, in Denmark, a 4000-kilogramme lifting limit during a work shift, in force in 2010, has had the effect that baggage can only be handled for a few effective working hours.

Packing bags manually is not only unreliable, but also extremely expensive.

For example, solely the packing costs of the personnel forming packing at Helsinki-Vantaa airport are several million euros annually.

Besides the costs and low reliability as well as the uneven daily traffic distribution of air-traffic timetables of a typical airport, labour capacity planning is quite difficult, because it is a challenge to recruit professional, security-cleared, and reliable temporary labour only to even the peak-period workload.

Supervisors, who are under continual pressure to produce savings, clearly prefer to underman shifts, rather than dimension capacity to be adequate, which, for its part, causes undesirable stress and other injuries due to hurry and tiredness, arising from unpredictable variations in workload.

Though there has been a long-term need for the automation of the loading of air-transport units, projects like the robot cell operating at Schiphol airport have not become widespread.

The reason for this is the complexity of robot systems and the unreliability this causes, as well as the relatively long time, of as much as 15 seconds, taken to automatically load a bag.

Loading carried out by robots is also challenging because the sizes of the bags on a conveyor belt are not known precisely, so that stacks are formed to some extent in an irrational order.

This causes the stacks of bags to be packed to fall over easily, which leads to an error state, which must be rectified by human labour.

In turn, this means that the movements of the robot must be very slow in order to avoid falling, so that at least part of the speed advantage brought by robotization is not achieved.

Thus, the known automated systems are neither particularly robust nor fast.

In addition, due to the complexity of the known automated systems, they are difficult to integrate with the existing infrastructure and the investment costs are high and challenging for those making purchasing decisions.

Because these solutions have little or no advance information available on baggage, and both the precision of the sensors and image-processing solutions and the computing capacity are limited, the measurement and calculation of the degree of filling and of the remaining empty space are naturally in practice uncertain and challenging.

When containers are filled manually, or using a known robot arrangement, the first containers are in practice filled only reasonably full, because packing really full is not only an intellectual challenge to people, but also physically considerably heavier and slower to implement.

In addition, the number of containers reserved for baggage in an aircraft is not at all tightly limited, so that, for example, the use of one ‘extra’ container may not mean anything to the loader, except to make his own task easier.

In addition, the statistical nature of the phenomenon leads to the fact that the last container or containers of those to be packed into a single aircraft load always remain partly empty.

One of the greatest challenges of the baggage-packing automation solutions presented in the literature and implemented in practice is that their introduction requires significance alterations to airport infrastructure—often even building baggage transport and sorting equipment from the very start around the packing-robot cell.

Images